hello!
i was wondering how do you pronounce and flex the pronouns "ləi/lɜ/lə/-ə" in your bio?
Hi! Thanks for asking, it's probably a good time to leave this out there… These are my pronouns in Italian, so idk how familiar you are with them and if my explanation will make sense but here we go:
L simply makes the sound L, ə is taken straight from IPA (international phonetic alphabet) and is also called schwa if you wanna look it up, it sounds like the first letter in English "about", "again", "across" ect. (Tip: just open your mouth slightly without making any shape with it, keeping it relaxed, and then release air), and i is just an i and it slides from the previous letter, so its IPA transcription would be ['ləj]. You can listen to it on this website by inserting the text in brackets between the slashes: x
All the other forms share their spelling with their IPA transcription to a T. The sound ɜ in lɜ is called long schwa, it's the vowel from the English word "bird" (pronounced with a British accent, its IPA transcription is ['bɜːd]). Its technical name is "open-mid central unrounded vowel", so it's similar to a schwa but your mouth should be slightly more open.
As for inflection:
Ləi is the "subject"—or, more accurately, nominative pronoun, also used with the accusative case ("object"), and, if you put a preposition before it, with any other case, e.g. "di ləi" for genitive ("of them", "their"), "a ləi" for dative ("to them"), and "con ləi" for instrumental ("with them"), if you want to stress the pronoun (it's called a "stressed form").
Lɜ is the unstressed dative form ("I gave them a book [I gave a book to them]": "Lɜ ho dato un libro"), and lə is the unstressed accusative form ("I'll call them": "Lə chiamerò"). They're clitics, so they can also attach to the end of a verb ("Give them a book": "Dallɜ un libro", "Call them": "Chiamalə").
For those who know Italian, basically lɜ is the gender-neutral equivalent of masculine "gli" and feminine "le", while lə is the equivalent of masc "lo" and fem "la".
Italian possessives and reflexives don't work like in English so there's no need to list them.
As for the -ə at the end, that's the "gendered ending", just like in Spanish and Portuguese it replaces feminine ending -a and masculine ending -o, so for example tío/tía in Spanish, tio/tia in Portuguese, zio/zia in Italian—which would become "ziə" in my case. It's again pronounced like the first letter of "again", "about" etc etc.
This also replaces the last letter in all gendered words, by attaching to the root of the word, even when they don't follow this simple -o/-a structure, so pairs like "autore (masc)/autrice (fem)" (author) become "autorə", or "professore/professoressa" (professor) become "professorə".
One thing that we don't usually list is the ending for plural words: instead of -i for plural masculine and -e for plural feminine, it's supposed to be -ɜ, so zii/zie (tíos/tías, tios/tias) becomes ziɜ.
For those who can read Italian and want to know more, check out the website italianoinclusivo.it!
